Paul Krugman
1
Hillary Clinton, who was at one point the head of the State Depart- ment, was using a private email account while other employees were using government accounts. She put herself above others. — N.N., MARYLAND My father spent many years working for the government. He once received a memo saying that far too many trivial documents were be- ing labeled as “top secret,” and that the practice should stop. That memo was also classified and labeled “top secret.” — GREG PETSKO, MASSACHUSETTS I have been baffled by friends who are in full agreement with me on most political matters, yet say that they just “don’t like” Mrs. Clinton. Apparently she just rubs them the wrong way. Of course, almost nobody who is passing judg- ment on her knows Mrs. Clinton personally. All we have to go on is the impression that she gives via the media. — T., NORTH CAROLINA Emails sent to Mrs. Clinton tra- versed commercial networks to get to her private server at home. The National Security Agency certainly has a copy of all her cor- respondence, and it is very likely that Russian and Chinese officials do as well. — Z., MARYLAND I am a Democrat, and I am very disappointed with Mrs. Clinton’s behavior and her contempt for gov- ernment transparency. — TIM, IOWA If someone stores information on a private server without a profes- sional, first-class security staff watching the network, she is basi- cally giving that information away. — TONY D., CALIFORNIA You must be kidding! What is the secretary of state doing using an insecure email account? — DAVE , FLORIDA The Hillary Clinton email “scan- dal” continues — and there is still no sign that she broke any rules when she was secretary of state, and no sign that she sent or received any- thing labeled “classified” — but she may have received and even forward- ed items that were later classified, or that “should” have been classified. By normal human standards, this is a big nothing. But in this case Clinton Rules — under which malign behavior is the default assumption — apply: Where there’s smoke there must be fire, even if everyone knows that the usual suspects are using big smoke machines. But Jeffrey Toobin at The New Yorker recently added a further twist: To the extent that some things may have been classified after the fact, it’s a very good guess that they shouldn’t have been — because the government classifies every- thing. (Read his article here: nyr. kr/1JhSNi4.) I know a bit about this from first- hand, if very old, experience. I was the senior international economist at the Council of Economic Advis- ers from 1982 to 1983. (Yes, Ronald Reagan was president, but it was a technocratic post. The senior domes- tic economist was a guy named Law- rence Summers. Whatever happened to him?) In that post, I received a lot of reports labeled “SECRET NOFORN NOCONTRACT PROPIN ORCON” (or no foreign nationals, no contractors, proprietary infor- mation, origin controlled). I can’t remember a single document so la- beled that included information that was remotely sensitive — or for that matter, that contained stuff that you couldn’t read in The New York Times or The Washington Post. And pretty soon I got very casual about the whole thing. We had a secu- rity officer who would come through our offices at night, and if he found classified material left out he would grab it, put it in the safe and issue a demerit. Luckily, the council chair- man got even more black marks than I did. Of course, I wasn’t working in an area of genuine security concern. But that’s kind of the point. Carter, Reagan and Machiavelli Rex Nutting, an editor at Mar- ketWatch, wrote a very nice article recently about the reality of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, which has been distorted beyond all recognition by the myth of St. Reagan (read the article here: on.mktw.net/1hOvdn7). As Mr. Nutting points out, Mr. Carter presided over faster average job growth and lower unemployment than did President Reagan; unfortu- nately for Mr. Carter, the timing was bad. He had vigorous growth for most of his presidency, but a recession at the end. Or to be more specific: The Federal Reserve put the economy through the wringer from 1979 to 1982 in order to bring inflation down. Mr. Carter presided over the first part of that double-dip recession, and got wrongly blamed for it. Mr. Reagan presided over the second part, and wrongly got credit for the subsequent recovery. What you see in all this is the remarkable political dominance of recent rates of change over even medium-term comparisons. Real median family income, which rose significantly throughout 1979, was still far from having returned to that peak by the end of Mr. Reagan’s first term. Nonetheless, Mr. Carter was booted from office amid derision, while Mr. Reagan won a landslide as a triumphant economic savior. But Machiavelli knew all about this: “Hence it is to be remarked that, in seizing a state, the usurper ought to examine closely into all those injuries which it is necessary for him to inflict, and to do them all at one stroke so as not to have to repeat them daily,” he wrote in “The Prince.” Make sure that the bad stuff hap- pens early in your rule so that you can claim credit when things get bet- ter, even if you leave the nation in a worse condition than it was when you arrived. Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist on the Op-Ed page and continues as a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. He was awarded the Nobel in economic science in 2008. Mr. Krugman is the author or editor of 21 books and more than 200 papers in professional journals and edited volumes. His latest book is “End This Depression Now!” IAN THOMAS JANSEN-LONNQUIST/THE NEW YORK TIMES Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, at an event in Nashua, N.H., in July. DEBATING POLITICS, ECONOMICS AND OTHER TIMELY TOPICS WITH PAUL KRUGMAN OF THE NEW YORK TIMES FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2015 ONLINE: COMMENTS Comments have been edited for clarity and length. For Paul Krugman’s latest thoughts and to join the debate online, visit his blog at krugman.blogs. nytimes.com. PAUL KRUGMAN When the Default Is to Classify Everything For much of the summer, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has faced scrutiny over her use of a private email account for official correspon- dence when she served as sec- retary of state. During Mrs. Clinton’s ten- ure at the State Department, from 2009 to 2013, the use of a private account was discour- aged, but not explicitly forbid- den, and Mrs. Clinton opted to use a personal domain connect- ed to a private server at her home for email correspondence. Recent reports have centered on the possibility that Mrs. Clinton might have divulged classified information in her emails, which would have gone against State Department rules because na- tional secrets could be vulnera- ble to attacks by hackers. A few months ago, Mrs. Clin- ton stated that there was “no classified material” in her emails, but after news reports surfaced suggesting that some of the information in her corre- spondence was classified but not marked as such, she clari- fied that she “did not send, nor did I receive material marked classified.” Jeffry Toobin, a staff writer at The New Yorker, explained earlier this month in an arti- cle that Mrs. Clinton may have discussed information that was technically classified, but “As [former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan] explained in his book ‘Secrecy: The American Experience’ and explored dur- ing a lifetime in public service, the definition of what consti- tutes a government secret has never been clear.” Mr. Toobin continued: “One of Clinton’s potentially classi- fied email exchanges is noth- ing more than a discussion of a newspaper story about drones. That such a discussion could be classified underlines the absur- dity of the current system.” Some analysts believe that the email controversy will fiz- zle, and Mrs. Clinton remains a favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination. Still, her poll numbers have declined in recent months, which some experts attribute to continuing negative coverage of this issue in the media. BACKSTORY Controversy Over Email READER COMMENTS FROM NYTIMES.COM Yes, Clinton Broke the Rules As political pundits are discover- ing to their horror, there’s probably more to the Donald Trump phenom- enon than mere celebrity. The fact is that the central planks of modern conservatism — slash- ing taxes for the rich and cutting benefits for the public at large — are deeply unpopular. In the past, Re- publicans have won elections only by wrapping these policies in other stuff. It’s been all about cutting benefits for “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks” (these are Reaganisms, in case you’re wondering) buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. And this in turn means that there is an empty box in American politics that is waiting to be filled. The matrix here shows the pos- sible positions. A welfare state available to all is the Democratic position — which is pretty much what other Western countries call the social democratic position. The dominant role in the modern Republican Party is played by a faction that links a desire to slash social insurance with a de facto disdain for Those People. Libertar- ians are also, in principle, for small government, but without the under- tones — and they are also basically absent from the existing electorate. And then there’s the empty box. Once upon a time, that box was filled by Southern Democrats, who pre- served Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation while they supported the New Deal. These voters have all since moved over to the Republican Party, and in the process they have developed an opposition to social insurance. But there are plenty of other voters who want Social Securi- ty and Medicare for people who look like them, but not those other people. And at some level, Mr. Trump, a Re- publican candidate for the presiden- tial nomination, is catering to that unserved population. Of course, Trumpism is a really bad name for this, partly because the man isn’t actually coherent, and partly because it’s still likely that he’s a case of hair today, gone tomorrow. And maybe nobody else will make a play for that box. But it’s also possible that we’ll see the rise of a movement that needs a better name. Hmm. How about National Social Democracy? Any problems with that? PAUL KRUGMAN A Place for Trump in Today’s G.O.P. Donald Trump recently delivered a speech in which he claimed that the “silent majority” was support- ive of his policies. Of course, this appeal to the silent majority always centers on the belief that other people are not pull- ing their weight, and that it’s time for someone to stand up and say “enough.” The demagogue saying that the loudest today is Mr. Trump. And it’s important that he remains in the race until the bitter end. After all, the silent majority is neither silent nor a majority. It is a loud and ignorant minority that has been manipulated by conservative dema- gogues who have realized that they can gain power by scaring people with imaginary enemies. It’s hard to tell whether Mr. Trump is destroying conservatism pur- posefully, or whether conservative policies are loudly and obnoxiously coming to their logical conclusions on their own. Nevetheless, Mr. Trump is the Pied Piper of modern conservatism, and he will lead the core of the that movement to irrelevance, where it belongs. — KYLE REISING, GEORGIA Mr. Krugman, as a lifelong moderate conservative, I find it insulting that you would infer that racism has anything to do with conservative philosophy. There are, and have been, racial bigots who also identify themselves as conservatives, Christians, Demo- crats or Republicans. That certainly does not mean that most, or even a significant fraction, of these groups are fundamentally racist. — G. STEGEN, WASHINGTON Can we please stop calling this nonsense “conservatism”? There’s nothing conservative about proposing policies that either haven’t been tried, or have been tried and empirically shown to have failed. This is all just anarchic radi- calism, for lack of a better term. It has nothing to do with conservative principles or philosophies. — NAME WITHHELD, NEW YORK Mr. Trump, who has never held public office, doesn’t seem to have an understanding of the American system of government — and of checks and balances in particular. He says that he’s going to get things done the way he did in the pri- vate sector, which probably means that he will bypass government and behave like a dictator. — SONJA, MINNESOTA I suspect that Mr. Trump is on the payroll of a consortium of news outlets that need something to write about. — GLENN SILLS, FLORIDA Is anyone else afraid of a Trump administration? We would be the United States Inc. If the corporate raiders control the presidency, we are toast. — NAME WITHHELD, CONNECTICUT Mr. Trump’s television experi- ence is paying off with great sound bites and succinct interviews. His campaign staff is offering sharp ad- vice, and he is following it. Meanwhile, his opponents are stuck in the clown car. — MICHAEL KITTLE, FRANCE READER COMMENTS FROM NYTIMES.COM Destroying Conservatism From Within KAL/CARTOON ARTS INTERNATIONAL/NEW YORK TIMES SYNDICATE
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Paul Krugman
Transcript of Paul Krugman
Hillary Clinton, who was at one point the head of the State Depart-ment, was using a private email account while other employees were using government accounts. She put herself above others.
— N.N., MARYLAND
My father spent many years working for the government. He
once received a memo saying that far too many trivial documents were be-ing labeled as “top secret,” and that the practice should stop. That memo was also classified and labeled “top secret.”
— GREG PETSKO, MASSACHUSETTS
I have been baffled by friends who are in full agreement with me
on most political matters, yet say that they just “don’t like” Mrs. Clinton. Apparently she just rubs them the wrong way. Of course, almost nobody who is passing judg-ment on her knows Mrs. Clinton personally. All we have to go on is the impression that she gives via the media.
— T., NORTH CAROLINA
Emails sent to Mrs. Clinton tra-versed commercial networks to get to her private server at home.
The National Security Agency
certainly has a copy of all her cor-respondence, and it is very likely that Russian and Chinese officials do as well.
— Z., MARYLAND
I am a Democrat, and I am very disappointed with Mrs. Clinton’s behavior and her contempt for gov-ernment transparency.
— TIM, IOWA
If someone stores information on a private server without a profes-sional, first-class security staff
watching the network, she is basi-cally giving that information away.
— TONY D., CALIFORNIA
You must be kidding! What is the secretary of state doing using an insecure email account?
— DAVE , FLORIDA
The Hillary Clinton email “scan-dal” continues — and there is still no sign that she broke any rules when she was secretary of state, and no sign that she sent or received any-thing labeled “classified” — but she may have received and even forward-ed items that were later classified, or that “should” have been classified.
By normal human standards, this is a big nothing. But in this case Clinton Rules — under which malign behavior is the default assumption — apply: Where there’s smoke there must be fire, even if everyone knows that the usual suspects are using big smoke machines.
But Jeffrey Toobin at The New Yorker recently added a further twist: To the extent that some things may have been classified after the fact, it’s a very good guess that they shouldn’t have been — because the government classifies every-thing. (Read his article here: nyr.kr/1JhSNi4.)
I know a bit about this from first-hand, if very old, experience. I was the senior international economist at the Council of Economic Advis-ers from 1982 to 1983. (Yes, Ronald Reagan was president, but it was a technocratic post. The senior domes-tic economist was a guy named Law-rence Summers. Whatever happened to him?) In that post, I received a lot of reports labeled “SECRET NOFORN NOCONTRACT PROPIN ORCON” (or no foreign nationals, no contractors, proprietary infor-mation, origin controlled). I can’t remember a single document so la-beled that included information that was remotely sensitive — or for that matter, that contained stuff that you couldn’t read in The New York Times or The Washington Post.
And pretty soon I got very casual about the whole thing. We had a secu-rity officer who would come through our offices at night, and if he found classified material left out he would grab it, put it in the safe and issue a demerit. Luckily, the council chair-man got even more black marks than I did.
Of course, I wasn’t working in an area of genuine security concern. But that’s kind of the point.
Carter, Reagan and MachiavelliRex Nutting, an editor at Mar-
ketWatch, wrote a very nice article recently about the reality of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, which has been distorted beyond all recognition by the myth of St. Reagan (read the article here: on.mktw.net/1hOvdn7). As Mr. Nutting points out, Mr. Carter presided over faster average job
growth and lower unemployment than did President Reagan; unfortu-nately for Mr. Carter, the timing was bad. He had vigorous growth for most of his presidency, but a recession at the end.
Or to be more specific: The Federal Reserve put the economy through the wringer from 1979 to 1982 in order to bring inflation down. Mr. Carter presided over the first part of that double-dip recession, and got wrongly blamed for it. Mr. Reagan presided over the second part, and
wrongly got credit for the subsequent recovery.
What you see in all this is the remarkable political dominance of recent rates of change over even medium-term comparisons. Real median family income, which rose significantly throughout 1979, was still far from having returned to that peak by the end of Mr. Reagan’s first term. Nonetheless, Mr. Carter was booted from office amid derision, while Mr. Reagan won a landslide as a triumphant economic savior.
But Machiavelli knew all about this: “Hence it is to be remarked that, in seizing a state, the usurper ought to examine closely into all those injuries which it is necessary for him to inflict, and to do them all at one stroke so as not to have to repeat them daily,” he wrote in “The Prince.”
Make sure that the bad stuff hap-pens early in your rule so that you can claim credit when things get bet-ter, even if you leave the nation in a worse condition than it was when you arrived.
Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist on the Op-Ed page and continues as a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. He was awarded the Nobel in economic science in 2008. Mr. Krugman is the author or editor of 21 books and more than 200 papers in professional journals and edited volumes. His latest book is “End This Depression Now!”
IAN THOMAS JANSEN-LONNQUIST/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, at an event in Nashua, N.H., in July.
DEBATING POLITICS, ECONOMICS AND OTHER TIMELY TOPICS WITH PAUL KRUGMAN OF THE NEW YORK TIMES FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2015
ONLINE: COMMENTS Comments have been edited for clarity and length. For Paul Krugman’s latest thoughts and to join the debate online, visit his blog at krugman.blogs.nytimes.com.
PAUL KRUGMAN
When the Default Is to Classify EverythingFor much of the summer,
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has faced scrutiny over her use of a private email account for official correspon-dence when she served as sec-retary of state.
During Mrs. Clinton’s ten-ure at the State Department, from 2009 to 2013, the use of a private account was discour-aged, but not explicitly forbid-den, and Mrs. Clinton opted to use a personal domain connect-ed to a private server at her home for email correspondence. Recent reports have centered on the possibility that Mrs. Clinton might have divulged classified information in her emails, which would have gone against State Department rules because na-tional secrets could be vulnera-ble to attacks by hackers.
A few months ago, Mrs. Clin-ton stated that there was “no classified material” in her emails, but after news reports surfaced suggesting that some of the information in her corre-spondence was classified but not marked as such, she clari-fied that she “did not send, nor did I receive material marked classified.”
Jeffry Toobin, a staff writer at The New Yorker, explained earlier this month in an arti-cle that Mrs. Clinton may have discussed information that was technically classified, but “As [former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan] explained in his book ‘Secrecy: The American Experience’ and explored dur-ing a lifetime in public service, the definition of what consti-tutes a government secret has never been clear.”
Mr. Toobin continued: “One of Clinton’s potentially classi-fied email exchanges is noth-ing more than a discussion of a newspaper story about drones. That such a discussion could be classified underlines the absur-dity of the current system.”
Some analysts believe that the email controversy will fiz-zle, and Mrs. Clinton remains a favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination. Still, her poll numbers have declined in recent months, which some experts attribute to continuing negative coverage of this issue in the media.
BACKSTORY
Controversy Over Email
READER COMMENTS FROM NYTIMES.COM
Yes, Clinton Broke the Rules
As political pundits are discover-ing to their horror, there’s probably more to the Donald Trump phenom-enon than mere celebrity.
The fact is that the central planks of modern conservatism — slash-ing taxes for the rich and cutting benefits for the public at large — are deeply unpopular. In the past, Re-publicans have won elections only by wrapping these policies in other stuff. It’s been all about cutting benefits for “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks” (these are Reaganisms, in case you’re wondering) buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. And this in turn means that there is an empty box in American politics that is waiting to be filled.
The matrix here shows the pos-sible positions. A welfare state available to all is the Democratic position — which is pretty much
what other Western countries call the social democratic position. The dominant role in the modern Republican Party is played by a faction that links a desire to slash social insurance with a de facto disdain for Those People. Libertar-ians are also, in principle, for small
government, but without the under-tones — and they are also basically absent from the existing electorate.
And then there’s the empty box. Once upon a time, that box was filled by Southern Democrats, who pre-served Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation while they supported
the New Deal. These voters have all since moved over to the Republican Party, and in the process they have developed an opposition to social insurance. But there are plenty of other voters who want Social Securi-ty and Medicare for people who look like them, but not those other people. And at some level, Mr. Trump, a Re-publican candidate for the presiden-tial nomination, is catering to that unserved population.
Of course, Trumpism is a really bad name for this, partly because the man isn’t actually coherent, and partly because it’s still likely that he’s a case of hair today, gone tomorrow. And maybe nobody else will make a play for that box.
But it’s also possible that we’ll see the rise of a movement that needs a better name. Hmm. How about National Social Democracy? Any problems with that?
PAUL KRUGMAN
A Place for Trump in Today’s G.O.P.
Donald Trump recently delivered a speech in which he claimed that the “silent majority” was support-ive of his policies.
Of course, this appeal to the silent majority always centers on the belief that other people are not pull-ing their weight, and that it’s time for someone to stand up and say “enough.” The demagogue saying that the loudest today is Mr. Trump.
And it’s important that he remains in the race until the bitter end. After all, the silent majority is neither silent nor a majority. It is a loud and ignorant minority that has been
manipulated by conservative dema-gogues who have realized that they can gain power by scaring people with imaginary enemies.
It’s hard to tell whether Mr. Trump is destroying conservatism pur-posefully, or whether conservative policies are loudly and obnoxiously coming to their logical conclusions on their own.
Nevetheless, Mr. Trump is the Pied Piper of modern conservatism, and he will lead the core of the that movement to irrelevance, where it belongs.
— KYLE REISING, GEORGIA
Mr. Krugman, as a lifelong moderate conservative, I find it insulting that you would infer that racism has anything to do with conservative philosophy.
There are, and have been, racial bigots who also identify themselves as conservatives, Christians, Demo-crats or Republicans. That certainly does not mean that most, or even a significant fraction, of these groups are fundamentally racist.
— G. STEGEN, WASHINGTON
Can we please stop calling this nonsense “conservatism”?
There’s nothing conservative about proposing policies that either haven’t been tried, or have been tried and empirically shown to have failed. This is all just anarchic radi-calism, for lack of a better term. It has nothing to do with conservative principles or philosophies.
— NAME WITHHELD, NEW YORK
Mr. Trump, who has never held public office, doesn’t seem to have an understanding of the American system of government — and of checks and balances in particular.
He says that he’s going to get things done the way he did in the pri-vate sector, which probably means that he will bypass government and behave like a dictator.
— SONJA, MINNESOTA
I suspect that Mr. Trump is on the payroll of a consortium of news outlets that need something to write about.
— GLENN SILLS, FLORIDA
Is anyone else afraid of a Trump administration? We would be the United States Inc.
If the corporate raiders control the presidency, we are toast.
— NAME WITHHELD, CONNECTICUT
Mr. Trump’s television experi-ence is paying off with great sound bites and succinct interviews. His campaign staff is offering sharp ad-vice, and he is following it.
Meanwhile, his opponents are stuck in the clown car.
— MICHAEL KITTLE, FRANCE
READER COMMENTS FROM NYTIMES.COM
Destroying Conservatism From Within
KAL/CARTOON ARTS INTERNATIONAL/NEW YORK TIMES SYNDICATE
